Tony Soprano, Don Vito Corleone and Tony Montana are some of the examples of characters moviegoers have loved despite of them being on the wrong side of the law. Villains, be it in film or TV, have managed to pick up sympathy from the audience.

There have been a few exceptional female gangsters though the organized crime business in North and South America has mainly been dominated by men. Griselda Blanco (nicknames: La Madrina, the Cocaine Godmother, the Black Widow and La Madrina) was a drug lord of the Medellín Cartel. She was a dominant figure in the 1970s and 1980s Miami based drug trade.

This is not the first attempt to dramatize her life story, Griselda Blanco also featured in the documentaries, Cocaine Cowboys and Cocaine Cowboys II. The Godmother is a new biopic of Blanco that comes from Norwegian director Eva Sørhaug (90 Minutes). As reported by Deadline, Catherine Zeta-Jones (Entrapment) will play the lead role in the film produced by Daniela Cretu under her First Born Films banner executive produced by Nicholas Pileggi.

During her career, Blanco who was a high-ranking member of the Medellín Cartel ran vast cocaine businesses in N.Y and Miami and this earned her a serious amount of prison time. She was ultimately killed in 2012 in a drive-by motorcycle assassination.

The casting has already attracted some resistance from people who are unhappy with the fact that a biopic about an acclaimed Columbian cocaine queen will be portrayed by a Welsh actress especially considering the recent study from University of California which revealed that Hispanic actresses do not have many opportunities for speaking roles in films, let alone lead roles. They are more likely in comparison to actresses of any other ethnicity to be shown partially or fully nude onscreen.

Well, this is not the first time Zeta Jones will portray a role of this nature. She played Elena Montero, daughter of the original Zorro in The Mask of Zorro, the film that launched her career as a Hollywood star. She also portrayed the role of a Mexican drug lord's wife in crime drama Traffic.